Adobe Acrobat can edit the text in a PDF, but full editing comes with a paid Acrobat plan. Most people need to change a PDF a few times a year, and a subscription for that is hard to justify.
Here are the alternatives, what each is good for, and where each falls short.
First, what kind of edit do you need?
"Editing a PDF" covers very different jobs:
- Adding things: text in a blank space, a signature, a highlight, a note. Almost any tool can do this.
- Changing existing text: fixing a typo, updating a date, replacing a name. This is where most free tools stop.
- Rearranging pages: merging, splitting, rotating, deleting. Widely available for free.
- Editing a scan: changing words on a page that is really a photograph. Very few tools can.
The free options
Your computer's built-in viewer
Preview on a Mac and Microsoft Edge on Windows open PDFs and can add text, draw, highlight and sign. Preview can also reorder, rotate and delete pages. Neither can change the text already on the page. Anything you type is a new layer on top.
Good for: filling in a form, signing, quick notes.
Microsoft Word and Google Docs
Both can open a PDF and turn it into an editable document. Word says as much when you open one: the result may not look exactly like the original. For a plain letter it is often fine. For forms, certificates, brochures and anything with columns or tables, fonts and spacing change and layouts break. You then save back to PDF, and every page has been rebuilt, not just the one you meant to change.
Good for: rewriting a simple, text-heavy document when the layout does not matter.
LibreOffice Draw
Free, and it opens a PDF as editable text boxes. It can change existing text, but it breaks lines into separate boxes and substitutes fonts it does not have, so edits often need cleaning up.
Good for: people comfortable fixing layouts by hand.
Online PDF editors
Browser-based editors need no installation. Most of the well-known ones either add text on top (rather than changing what is there), limit you to a few documents a day, or put a watermark on the result unless you pay.
PencoPDF is built for the one job the others find hardest: changing the words already on the page. You click a line, retype it, and the new words are set in the page's own font, in the same place, with the old ones removed. It also works on scans, which it reads first, and it is free with no watermark and no account.
Good for: changing existing text, including on scans, without the change showing.
Which one to use
| You want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Sign or fill in a form | Your built-in viewer, or Sign a PDF |
| Fix a typo, a date or a name | Edit PDF text |
| Change words on a scan | Edit a scanned PDF |
| Rewrite most of a text-only document | Word or Google Docs, then save as PDF |
| Merge, split or rotate pages | Merge, split or rotate |
| Make the file smaller | Compress a PDF |
A note on privacy
An online editor means uploading the file. Check what happens to it afterwards. PencoPDF processes files on servers in Germany and deletes them 24 hours after your last edit. The details are in the privacy policy.